Native bee community composition and microbiomes in coastal wetlands and inland deserts

Native bees create networks of mutualisms that span from pollination services across habitats to microbial communities within the bee’s gut. These bees have varied life histories and behaviors, and are crucial pollinators for the diverse plant life of the US Southwest. Primary global threats to native bee populations include habitat loss and fragmentation, invasive plants / bees, pathogen spillover, and climate change. Many of these threats are prominent in warm-weather coastal wetlands. Compared to other habitats, very little is known about the terrestrial arthropod communities of wetlands and marshes. This knowledge gap limits our ability to assess pollinator population health and reduces our capacity to create effective management strategies that encourage thriving wetland plant-pollinator communities.



Wetlands are essential ecosystems for migratory bird species and uniquely adapted animals and plants. These habitats have been dramatically reduced in the last half-century – less than 10% of California's wetlands remain. Laws regulating wetland conservation have been moderately successful at protecting large organisms like birds and mammals. However, the efficacy of those protections for native pollinators remains understudied.



Research focused on bee communities and their microbiota has not been conducted in coastal wetlands. This presentation covers the preliminary data collected through field surveying to address how native solitary bee communities and their microbiomes vary across biogeographic scales, with bee diversity, and across host taxa. The results of this work will begin to close a wide knowledge gap for researchers, stakeholders, and land managers.